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artisan bread in 5 oven spring problem

artisan bread in 5 oven spring problem

I've been working with the 'Artisan bread in five minutes a day' master recipe, tweaking and adjusting and I've gotten just about everything the way I like it: thin, crackly crust, lovely open cell crumb, and slight tang in flavor. The only problem is that I get little to no oven spring.

Here are my modifications:

Hunk of dough held back from last batch (dissolved in some of the warm water)

I don't have my copy of the 5 minute book yet, but I know there's a whole wheat recipe in there as well. How does your version compare to the WW in the book? Did you try the master formula as written, and did it perform OK for you? I'm mostly a WW baker, but I tried the regular master formula, and had great success with it when I folllowed the instructions. I haven't tried a WW version yet. Anyway, my meandering point is that maybe you need to find out if you have problems with the formula as written before changing it. You can easily make a half batch to experiment with.

Did you increase the water to account for the WW flour? For 2 to 3 cups of WW flour, your water should be 3 to 10 tablespoons more than the original recipe.

The recipe that was given for this required 1 1/2 tablespoons of yeast and 1 1/2 tablespoons of salt with 6 cups of flour and 3 cups of water. I am doing this with whole wheat flour only and it works fine. You stated that you are only using 3/4 tablespoon of yeast with 1 1/2 tablespoon of salt. This is probably the problem.

I've solved my oven spring problem by stretching and folding the dough a few times as soon as I remove it from the refrigerated dough bucket, then letting it rise for at least an hour.

Yesterday I baked one loaf of the deli rye and forgot to fold it. No oven spring even with a longer rise. Later in the day I took out another hunk of dough, did the stretch and fold, then let it rise for about 90 minutes. That loaf had a nice spring. The dough in both cases was three days old.

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